Chelen Johnson
They Might Be Giants are using data from the Kepler mission to classify the brightness changes of giant stars in an effort to understand how the observed brightness variations of giant stars may relate to the different stages of giant star evolution.
The "new" astronomy has become something we all knew was coming: handling huge chunks of data and learning how to mine this information from sets so large that it is simply mind boggling. The interesting thing is that many people are not aware of this, notably teachers in the trenches.
While a lot of astronomy is done by computer, nothing compares to having a human look over the data.
I didn’t know just how much data is publicly available. Anyone can do astronomy – you just need to come up with a question and figure out how to use the archives.
